Iron Axe Read Online Free Page B

reached out to touch the pouch. “If this isn’t magic, what is it?”
    â€œTruth.” She pushed his hand away. “That’s the most potent kind of magic. Never forget that, my son.”
    And that was all she would say.
    Other times, the village women came to the stable to have their fortunes read. Mother was awful at reading fortunes. The problem wasn’t that her predictions never came true—the problem was that they
always
came true. Danr knew because he scrunched up in a cow stall whenever she did it so he could listen. When Lorta, wife to Hagbart the smith, came during her third month of pregnancy to ask if her child would be a boy or girl, Mother touched the pouch at her throat and said Lorta would miscarry within two weeks. Lorta ran away in horrified tears, and who could blame her? But in ten days, Hagbart the smith was digging a tiny grave. When Henreth Ravsdottr came to ask if her intended fiancé, Jens, was cheating on her with another woman, Mother touched the pouch and told her Jens was not—he was cheating on her with Henreth’s older brother, Kell. That had been a day.
    Mother always told the truth. Always. It frightened people as much as it fascinated them. Danr himself learned early on not to ask questions he didn’t want the answers to.
No one likes the truth
was one of Mother’s favorite sayings.
    But now Mother was gone, dead of coughing sickness thewinter after Danr turned eleven. True, she worked in the house, but she lived in the stables, and they were rotten cold in winter. Danr begged Alfgeir and his wife, Gisla, to let his mother sleep by their big, warm fire instead of near the stable’s tiny, damp one, but although Alfgeir and Gisla would eat Halldora’s cooking and let her clean their house, they wouldn’t let her share their pristine hearth, no, they wouldn’t.
    â€œA woman who beds an animal and whelps an animal must sleep with animals,” Gisla snapped.
    Mother’s fever rose higher and higher while her cough grew weaker and weaker. Danr didn’t know what to do. He finally coaxed one of the cows to lie beside her for warmth and pressed her shivering body against its fur while icy drafts stole in through the stable door and circled her pallet like hungry wolves. He couldn’t keep them away, no matter how strong he was. The other cows calmly chewed their cud, unaware of the dying woman and the terrified boy in the stall next to theirs. Danr prayed to Fell and Belinna, to Grick, queen of gods and lady of the hearth, and even to Olar, the king of gods himself, pleading with them to spare his mother’s life. He begged with all the fervor a boy could bring up. But just before dawn, Halldora shuddered once and went still.
    Danr didn’t cry when he wrapped her body in old rags and amulets to Halza that he carved himself. He didn’t cry when he built her funeral pyre in the northern pasture. He didn’t cry when no one, not even Alfgeir, came to help him hold the torch to the wood or watch the flames blaze to the sky. But when Danr came back to the stable and lay down in his stall, alone with the cows, then he cried.
    Chains clanked, startling Danr out of the memories. Ahead of him on the road, a fierce-looking man in a black cloak rode a black horse. He led a line of humans cuffed to a long beam with bronze shackles on their feet. Another manin black rode behind them. Above the second man hovered a glowing figure whose shape seemed to twist. A sprite—one of the Fae come to oversee the slavers.
    Fear settled over Danr. Even the monster inside him cowered. Swallowing, he pulled the steer several paces off the road to let the procession pass. A thousand years ago, just before the Sundering had cracked the continent, a number of the Kin had gone to war against the Fae—and lost. Now, more than ten centuries later, the Fae were still extracting tribute. Except they didn’t dare take it from the warlike